In a blog post from earlier in the year, 28-year-old Keely Favell shared pictures of a 57-pound cyst that she first thought was a late-term pregnancy.

According to Favell’s blog post, when she saw her belly expand, she was too nervous to go the doctor. “I was…afraid that I would be dismissed as merely being fat,” Favell writes. It wasn’t until she stared experiencing blackouts at work that Favell’s mom convinced her to go to the doctor. “Looking at me, anyone would have assumed I was 9 months pregnant,” she writes.

Once she went to a doctor, Favell was examined for a possible pregnancy — but doctors found something else that had them stunned. “The ultrasound showed I had a large ovarian mass,” Favell writes. “This led to me being referred to a High Risk Obstetrics Consultant who told me that surgery was a must, and I would be cut open from my chest bone all the way down to my pelvic bone; pretty much like an old-fashioned C-Section.”

She ultimately went in for surgery in March, though her doctors still were not able to tell her exactly how big the cyst was — or whether if it was dangerous or not.

After more than four hours of surgery, the doctors were able to successfully remove a 57-pound cyst. Although the 28-year-old didn’t share exactly what type of growth it was, since she said the aftermath was “plain sailing,” it’s possible she was experiencing a mucinous cystadenoma — a cyst that begins on the ovaries, becomes filled with mucuslike liquid, and then continues to grow.

A woman in Alabama this summer shared a similar story in which she had a 50-pound mucinous cystadenoma removed from her ovary. But an ovarian cyst reaching that size is very rare.

For Favell, the removal of the cyst seems to mean a new lease on life. “The shock on my family’s faces said it all,” she wrote of the surgery’s aftermath. “I was literally half the woman I was going down.”